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Sunday, September 05, 2010

Wild Grapes

Sometimes you hear about animals doing crazy things. I want to tell you about a plant that’s been on a rampage. It’s a wild grape vine. With all the rain in central Wisconsin, the wild grapes have been growing, growing, growing. In some cases to the tops of trees near the trail by the pond.

For many years, grape vines have grown on the east and south sides of my old pump house. Built in 1912 and still standing tall, the pump house serves mostly as a woodshed these days. Not satisfied with growing on the outside of the pump house, a grape vine has decided to look around inside the building. So it snuck in, through an open space where the roof connects to the walls.

Not knowing at all how wild grapes look at the world—some days I can’t figure out how I see the world—the grape vine must have decided that not all is so hunky-dory in a dark, old, musty, bat-filled pump house, now woodshed. So it searched for a way out, which it found in a crack above the door. When you approach the pump house, you see a grape vine hanging over the door, green, happy and growing. Where to next, I wonder for this traveling plant?

THE OLD TIMER SAYS: Nothing succeeds like excess.

CHECK THIS OUT: CRANBERRY RED book launches:

--Barns and Noble Madison West, September 21, 7:00 p.m.

--Patterson Memorial Library, Wild Rose, Sunday October 24, 1:00 p.m.

Learn all about cranberry growing, county agent work, and what happens when research goes amuck. UW Press is the publisher of this, my fourth novel, in the Ames County series.